I'm new to the conversation, so please ignore this comment if it is
irrelevant. I write occasional articles for the New Statesman, in addition
to being a professor at Holy Cross College in the states. I am currently
working on a book on the politics of pensions privatization in the US and
UK.
A previous contribution said that the basic issue was between state
control and "letting the market rip." That, to me, sounds like a very old
politics way of defining the issues, esp. in the British context. Also,
discussions of where externalities exist is pretty old as well.
What seems like a better way of framing the issue is technocracy vs.
participation. Where do experts associated with central government
have a claim to know better what kinds of decisions need to be made, or
have superior incentives to make the "right" decision, and where are
localities (however defined) competent to make basic political decisions?
I think these conversations quite easily drift off into how "we" can make
better decisions: market pricing of environmental goods is one such
example. But the better question is where do we, experts, professors,
and policy wonks, have a claim to decision-making superior to locally
elected officials? (however reconstituted) My sense of Britain is that the
state itself is so massively over-centralized that it leaches out most
sense of individual political control. Rather than thinking primarily about
policy (much of which depends upon continued centralized control),
maybe a discussion of center-periphery issues would be useful (unless
of course you've already had it and I've just said what David Marquand
already has.....)
I wrote an article about this in the August 23, 1997 issue of New
Statesman, entitled "Think Local, Act Local" that may be of some interest
to some of you.
steven teles
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